Hydrophilic polymers play a great role as supports for chromatographic procedures in biotechnology. A variety of methods has been available for the analytical isolations of proteins. Plastic and glass supports are common materials which are widely used for chemical binding of proteins. Sol-gel glass is one of the new supports to direct trapping of different materials (Brinker and Scherer, 1990). This matrix was obtained together with chemical and biochemical reagents using the process of polymerization of the support (Zusman et al., J. Non-Crystal. Solids, 122:107-109, 1990; Materials Letters, 10:1-5, 1990; Analyt. Biochem., 201:103-106, 1992).
The first phase hydrolysis of this process can be described as follows: EQU Si(OR).sub.4 +H.sub.2 O&lt;==&gt;HOSi(OR).sub.3 +ROH
As this process continues Si--OH groups are obtained. The next phase of polymerization is the polycondensation. This latter phase is characterized by elimination of H.sub.2 O molecules and alcohol and by transforming SiOH molecules into latticed fibers of SiO.sub.2.
Obtaining a small volume of polymerized glass from 1 ml of tetramethoxysilane has taken about 14 days. In spite of that, the obtained sol-gel glass is a porous material. Part of chemical and biochemical compounds remains inside of the gel-glass mass inaccessible for any external reagent. This decreases the amount of trapped materials for performing analytical reactions, especially in biochemical and immunochemical studies. To have access to all the reagent molecules, the prepared glass was crushed into a powder.
All these procedures have very serious defects. As is known, SiO.sub.2 is insoluble in the water. Alkaline environment dissolves SiO.sub.2 to form silicates according to the reaction EQU SiO.sub.2 +2NaOH&lt;==&gt;Na.sub.2 SiO.sub.3 +H.sub.2 O
SiO.sub.2 in the powder condition passes this reaction very fast, and this makes those columns unstable under effects of alkaline buffers which are necessary for purification of proteins and performing the diagnostic procedures.
In the present invention described herein, all the advantages of the prior art are maintained and a new approach which avoids the disadvantages of the prior art is provided.